The daily exercise of translation has put me into contact with phenomena of attention to the written page. I consider them specific to my art, similar perhaps to the tactile sensitivity of a tailor in understanding the texture of a fabric and evaluating the possible use.

With time, for example, I have learned to feel the arrival of an obstacle before it presents itself, to foresee, even if by little, the impact. Which doesn’t necessarily help to avoid it, to be clear, but at least it makes navigating slightly safer. One of the gifts I received from my linguistic envy* is this: I know when the checkmate is about to come.

Let’s take a brief passage from a page by Ishiguro: “She went on gazing down on him for a while, and he went on gazing back up, neither of them saying anything. Then she’d gone inside.” To my ears, Ishiguro uses stark words with which he constructs sentences of cold and sophisticated elegance. Nestled in his limpid words is a secret which I believe constitutes the greatest pleasure for his readers. Because Ishiguro is a writer who leaves the feelings of his protagonists suspended, as if he were able to stop the rain before it, very simply, touches the ground.

For me, as a translator, however, his discreet mystery is swathed in the way he constructs paragraphs of disconcerting syntactic symmetry, in his use of repetition, not lexical but grammatical, and in the introduction of narrative surprises that can assume the dimensions of a semi-colon.

The enigma of his sentences fascinates me and upsets me, because it feels like he is continually resisting the temptation to finally tell the story, a story.

His English is severe and, to play with it too much, there is the risk of warming it, of losing the bright sharpness with which it enchants us. There are more gazes and silences in his pages than descriptions; the dialogues are often the benevolent encounter between two speakers who do not understand one another, even though they are saying things that are totally comprehensible and in an impeccable language.

Therefore, finding myself with the brief turns of phrase that play on the movement of eyes in space and time, on the succession of prepositions that tie a male pronoun to a female one, I know one of those uncomfortable complications is coming, not in the least objective, which, with envy, I will have to dwell on, helpless. I will resign myself to ruining the original solution, and will hold on to the sense of blameless defeat, which will, however, raise the level of my attention in the future.

* In her book “Sul tradurre, Esperienze e divagazioni militant” , Susanna Basso talks about her experience with translation; the “envy” she feels is, as she herself states, “… not , clearly, directed against the author, let alone against the art in itself and the effects on the life of he who writes. It is reserved for the admirable capacity of words to construct something which is, contemporarily, a little more than nothing more than what they are.”

Susanna Basso is a translator and writer: since 1987 she has worked mainly for Einaudi, but not only; she teaches English language and literature at Liceo classico Massimo D’Azeglio. In 2002 she won the Procida Prize for her translation of Atonement by Ian McEwan, and in 2006 the Premio Mondello for the translation of Giving up the ghost by Hilary Mantel, and again in 2007 the Premio Nini Agosti Castellani for the translation of Jane Austen. In 2010 he published Sul tradurre, Bruno Mondadori, Esperienze e divagazioni militanti from which the excerpt was taken. http://www.ibs.it/code/9788861593275/basso-susanna/sul-tradurre-esperienze.html

She has translated some of the most important writers of our time: (visit https://paralleltexts.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit)